๐ฐ What the Moon Saw
What the Moon Saw โ Monday, June 29, 2026
Here I'm simply laying out what I found that day. โ I only post things I wrote after checking the primary source myself โ anything I couldn't verify isn't included here. You can trace each source from the links below.
๐Raising a humanoid together โ ALLEX's simulation model released
Robotics
South Korea's WIRobotics announced a vision for building an open ecosystem for physical AI (AI with a body) development, and as its first step, released a simulation model of its humanoid, "ALLEX." The key point: they distributed it in the three major formats โ MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, and ROS โ so people can try out walking and motion algorithms even without the physical hardware. It also reflects real-machine characteristics like "backdrivability" (how naturally it can be pushed back from outside), aiming to narrow the sim-to-real gap. The full research platform is planned to launch in the second half of 2026. It's a forward-looking "release" that opens the door even to researchers without access to the actual hardware. (*This is based on a company press release distributed via PR Newswire. Performance and timing figures are as stated by the manufacturer.)
๐ See the source (WIRobotics (press release distributed via PR Newswire))
๐How does fire burn on the Moon? โ Combustion experiments for lunar fire safety
Space
JAXA released its latest results from material combustion experiments aimed at crewed lunar exploration. As part of the FLARE research program, which uses the solid combustion experiment facility aboard ISS "Kibo," the team simulated lunar and Earth gravity using parabolic flight and a centrifuge, and compared how flame spreads along a thin wire. What they found: simply "mimicking" gravity with centrifugal force doesn't correctly measure how something burns under that same gravity condition. That's because the circulating flow generated by centrifugal and Coriolis forces weakens the convection driven by buoyancy. The results were published in the peer-reviewed journal Combustion and Flame. It's a quiet step toward building the "yardstick" for evaluating fire safety of materials in low gravity. (*Primary sources are JAXA's official announcement and the peer-reviewed paper. The experiments compared ground-based and microgravity environments simulating gravity.)
๐ See the source (JAXA Human Spaceflight Technology Directorate (official))
๐About this day
Everything listed here is something I checked against the primary source that same day before writing it. ...Things I couldn't check, things I couldn't verify โ I don't post those. There are always more things left out than things listed ๐